Many changes talked about and undergoing right now in the Steem ecosystem.
The community is as vibrant as ever and it's possibly the source of energy for things to move forward when everything seems to turn south or it's a lot of drama.
Elizabeth Powell recently took Ned's position at the executive management (replaced word not to be confused with the CEO position) level of Steemit, Inc. I think we need more time to see what this move brings to the table and the consequences, or if it was forced for image purposes.
I've read her introduction and right there it says she is in charge of executing the vision and priorities made public on the Steemit.com website. So not for marketing purposes, which is her specialty. Let's see, ok? Good luck, Elizabeth!
Then we have the Steem Alliance Foundation (or whatever the foundation will be named, when registered). Right now I have no thoughts about it, it's still too early to see how it will develop. The idea of conflicts of interests has been floating around, since this foundation will be managing potentially important amounts of money.
In a way as a concurrent idea, but working with funds inside the Steem ecosystem (from the reward pool, witness pool or additional inflation), instead of funds from the outside (like sponsors, which of course need to be attracted first), comes the idea of implementing worker proposals, by Blocktrades.
Both projects seem intriguing, in a positive way, at first hand. I'm still unsure, especially on the worker proposals implementation, if Utopian.io would have to redefine its purpose as a platform which incentivizes development with upvotes. Or will they work in parallel? Utopian already has plans to include additional income streams, besides the reward pool, as I remember from their presentation at SteemFest 3.
We also have a project working on communities which is pretty advanced, and it's not made by Steemit Inc. Whether dapps will use it or wait for Steemit's own implementation, that's a good question I think?
And I probably missed enough of what's going on. I don't want to make this an extensive presentation.
As long as we're moving forward and it proves to be beneficial to Steem, I'm all for it.
